A wild ride on a winding career path

Ambiguity may be anathema to lawyers, but when you’re immersed in the dynamic environment of a global company at the cutting edge of technology, you learn to work with it.

Allen & Overy alum James Quisumbing knows what he’s talking about. He’s been with Meta since 2020—his second engagement with the company—and is currently associate general counsel, security, for Asia-Pacific.

“It’s an emerging regulatory environment and the technology is able to be adapted quickly,” he explains. “You learn to make balanced decisions in that environment.”

Working for tech companies—first Facebook, as Meta was then known, then JUUL Labs, then Facebook again—has been “the highlight so far” of an interesting career. He loves their “dynamism and willingness to move fast.” 

Working with excellent people who care about their job “brings the best out of you,” he says. “It’s fast-paced and full of colleagues who are my peer group. You have to trust that all of you, together, will come up with the best decision.”

All change

James, who was raised in Australia and now lives in Singapore, comes from a family of lawyers in the Philippines. Law didn’t appeal, so he “ended up studying military history” at university. But the law found him in the form of his customers—many of them lawyers—at a fruit department he managed in a Sydney supermarket. “What they did sounded impactful: it was a job of solving problems.” After talking with them, he got his first job as a clerk at Blake Dawson, and things went from there.

When James graduated from law school in 2008, it was clear his career wasn’t going to be straightforward. At law school, the focus had been on investment banking, but the landscape changed after the financial crash of 2008. “We had to retrain quickly,” he says. “Instead of becoming a derivatives lawyer, I became a stock market enforcement lawyer.”

It was a critical time for financial institutions and James was seconded from Blake Dawson to support Morgan Stanley’s Sydney office. “I was very close to the people who made decisions at the trading level, and I got to see how a trading business works,” he says. 

“I worked for some incredible compliance and legal professionals who deliberately sat on the trading floor with the traders—not in their offices in the compliance department. In other words, they were embedded with their clients. I thought, ‘That’s the kind of professional I want to be.’”

The Gray, the weird, and the wonderful

James relocated to Hong Kong in 2009 as a compliance officer at Morgan Stanley. At the time, he says, “the profession was expanding beyond ‘checkbox’ work. It was an interesting hybrid of legal work and actual decision-making.” 

He continues: “When you’re a lawyer, you’re there to tell the business what’s legal and what’s not, and what options the business has. In compliance advisory, you’re giving risk analysis; it’s about the gray area and what’s best for the firm within that space. It’s a different way of thinking and it was fascinating.”

But the law called again, although the odds were against him: “I’d not done enough time in a law firm, and I was living in Hong Kong—a jurisdiction I wasn’t qualified in!” 

Even so, in 2010 he secured a job with Clifford Chance—and went from being a financial regulatory specialist to a general litigator. When he left in 2014, he had qualified in Hong Kong and had both a strong understanding of financial institutions’ trading systems and exposure to “weird and wonderful” litigation cases. 

He was looking to develop further, and that’s what A&O offered.

James has many highlights from his two years at A&O working with Simon Clark (now retired), Fai Hung Cheung and Matt Bower, both of whom remain partners at A&O Shearman. “My peers were some of the finest lawyers I’ve ever met, and they wore the pressure of the job lightly,” he says. “I worked on some high-profile probate matters, and under Simon’s leadership, I took a case to [the] Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong. But what I remember most about A&O are the good people.” 

James still works with Fai Hung and the broader Greater China disputes team in his role at Meta. “I work with a U.S. company with operations all around the world, so having a U.S. arm can be a gamechanger for A&O Shearman. It helps the firm cement its presence across many jurisdictions.”

Irresistible opportunity

In 2016, James moved to Facebook, led there by his experience, of which “A&O was a big part.”

“I’d wanted to go back in-house at some point, once I had more skills and a good opportunity, but the roles are limited if you’re aiming to be a litigator—you’re looking at financial institutions or big corporate litigation teams. I wanted to be more of a general counsel. Facebook was looking for its first regional counsel for Southeast Asia and the sheer breadth of what I could be doing was irresistible.” 

Facebook was in its hypergrowth phase when James joined a small team of six lawyers covering APAC. As lawyer number seven, he covered the whole of Southeast Asia. “We were a growing business… I was explaining our business structure to governments, I was working through the beginnings of what became online content regulations, and security and privacy issues.

“When you work in social media, whatever is happening on the news is being reflected on the platforms. Governments and regulators are reacting to that in real time, and you’re trying to keep up. On top of that, Facebook had all the regular challenges of any multinational. I had to work with employment lawyers; I had to understand how our tax structure worked; I had to work on corporate governance issues—the whole gamut—across ten countries. I had to learn fast.”

A new challenge

After helping Facebook establish itself, James decided in 2019 to join some ex-Facebook colleagues at the APAC arm of JUUL Labs, the American electronic cigarette company. He was looking for another challenge, and he got it: as general counsel in a company that manufactured physical goods in a controversial regulatory environment.

He found many unexpected parallels with his previous experience. “I was a tobacco lawyer but there was a lot of technology behind the product,” James says. “JUUL made a lot of sense for someone like me because it was an emerging regulatory environment, a controversial product, expansion around the region, and there was a significant regulatory and government affairs component.

“I saw the entire lifecycle of the company. I went from setting up the market, and advocating for the market and making money, to dealing with regulatory and operational headwinds, to exiting the markets. That’s a wild ride for any lawyer.”

The best of both worlds

When James finished at JUUL Labs in 2020, Facebook was starting a new security legal team to work with law enforcement. James was recruited into that team as an associate general counsel for Asia-Pacific.

“The best part about this role is that all my previous experience is relevant,” says James. “To give proper advice around user data disclosure and government enforcement issues, you have to navigate different legal regimes and understand your client and the product well. 

“Another aspect of the role is helping to navigate enforcement risk and investigation risk, so you’ve got to be a corporate lawyer, to work through what types of companies should be set up, where in the world they should be incorporated and what those companies do. 

“The third aspect is working with leadership to help them understand any criminal exposure and enforcement exposure the company may have.”

Working for a tech company is, he says, “the best of both worlds”—one that makes sense of his diversity of experience in corporate and emerging regulatory environments. “My career has been across industries and through many highs and lows,” he says, “but I wouldn’t change it.”

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